A few months later she came, and we went to the station to meet her.  I could not see that she had changed a bit.  She did not look a day older, and the bouncing baby she carried in her arms was a darling.

Of course she could not go back to the Association.  That was not for married women.  But we found her a room just across the street, and in no time, she dropped right back into the place she had left.  Every morning she took the baby boy to the creche and every night she took him home, and a better cared-for, better loved, more wisely bred youngster was never born, nor a happier one.  Every one loved him just as every one loved Josephine.

There I thought Josephine’s story ended, and so far as she was concerned, it did.

But when the baby was six years old, and forward for his age, the Matron of the Friendly Society came into my room one day, when I was there to take a longer rest than usual, after a very trying case, and told me that she was in great distress.  A friend of hers, who had been her predecessor, and was now the Matron of an Orphan Asylum in New York State, was going to the hospital to have a cataract removed from her eye, and had written to ask her to come and take her place while she was away.  She begged me to replace her at the Friendly Society while she was gone.  As her assistant was a capable young woman, and my relations with every one were pleasant I was only too glad to consent.  She had always been so good to me.

She was gone a month.

On her return I noticed that she was distressed about something.  I taxed her with it.  She said it was nothing she felt like talking about.  But one evening when Josephine had been sewing for me, after she was gone, the Matron, who had been in my room, got up, and closed the door after her.

“I’ve really got to tell you what is on my mind,” she said.  “And I am sure that you will look on it as a confidence.  You know the asylum where I have been is not far from Utica, where Josephine went when she was married.  Well, one day, about a fortnight after I got there, I had occasion to look up the record of a child in the books, and my attention was attracted by a name the same as Josephine’s.  The coincidence struck me, and I read the record that on a certain day, which as near as I could calculate, must have been a year after Josephine left, a person of her name, written down as a widow, a member of the Orthodox Church, had adopted a male child a few months old.  I was interested.  I did not suspect anything, but I asked the assistant matron if she remembered the case.  She did, clearly.  She said the woman was a dear little thing, who had come there shortly before, a young widow, a seamstress.  She was a lonely little thing, and some one connected with the asylum had given her work, which she had done so well that she soon had all she needed.  She had been employed in the asylum, and loved children as they did her.  The child in question was the son of